That's not an ugly urban cycle, that's progress! Rents and real estate prices go up, prompting new development and increasing density. Much of San Francisco, e

That's not an ugly urban cycle, that's progress! Rents and real estate prices go up, prompting new development and increasing density. Much of San Francisco, even near(south of) the downtown core is 3-5 story industrial buildings and parking lots ripe to be turned to high-density use. Right now this "ugly urban cycle" has Twitter and a VC firm moving into the shady Mid-Market neighborhood next to the Tenderloin (Benchmark Capital is literally next door to s trip club) with other startups hot on their heels. This is a good thing. An "ugly urban cycle" is not when property values rise and people move IN to the city, it's when people flee to the suburbs (see: Detroit, or most U.S. cities in the 1960s). That said, I agree it's annoying that people tend to pile into city in herds, because it takes on the order of 5 years for real estate to be approved and built to meet demand, and by then there's often been a reversal and you get a flood of supply at exactly the wrong time. But that's actually good for the city too - lots of new housing at low cost. The problem isn't real estate, it's people - our herd instincts and inconvenient relocation patterns. Similarly, the solution isn't to try and divert money people _choose_ to spend living in preferable locations into health care (where inefficiency and costs are already too high) or "gadgets" (what?) but to get better ways of mitigating the discrepancy in speed between how populations shift and how long it takes to develop new places for people to live. (PS Downtown Oakland is fantastic and still cheap. Maybe if SF rents get high enough people will get over their hangups about a demographically young downtown with bustling nightlife that's 5 minutes by BART from SOMA) (PPS You'll notice implicit in my comments is the fact that real estate developers do NOT reliably get rich as the result of a boom. It takes 5 years or more to entitle and build an urban mid- or high-rise housing development, which means it's a crapshoot whether a boom will be on when you're done. In fact developers can go broke if they build now assuming the economy will stay hot because if it's cooled when they are on the market selling they'll miss their numbers. The people who make money in the boom are existing owners who sell and landlords who can jack up rents. As it happens these are the same people who will take a bath when things cool off again.)